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Title: Anarchism in Russia Author: Nick Heath Date: 2009 Language: en Topics: history, Russia, Russian Revolution, Soviet Union Source: Heath, Nick. “Anarchism, Russia.” In The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present, edited by Immanuel Ness, 141–143. Vol. 1. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
Despite the fact that two of the most important theoreticians of
anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, were Russian, anarchism
in that country never really developed as a movement until after the
beginning of the twentieth century. Whilst Bakunin made strenuous
efforts to recruit among Russian exiles, no credible organization
modeled on his ideas emerged in the home country during his lifetime.
Zemfir C. Ralli-Arbore (aka Z. K. Ralli, 1848–1933), a young Romanian
born in Bessarabia within the Russian empire and an associate of
Bakunin, set up a small group in Geneva, the Revolutionary Commune of
Russian Anarchists, in 1873, but it was not until 1892 that Armenian
doctor Alexander Atabekian (1868–ca. 1940), an associate of Kropotkin,
established a group called the Anarchist Library. This group smuggled
literature into Russia with very few short-term results. At the end of
the 1890s, the Geneva Group of Anarchists took up this work again.
Unrest within the Russian empire in 1903 led to the establishment of the
first viable anarchist grouping in Bialystok. This group, Bor’ba
(Struggle), was composed of mainly Jewish young workers and students,
disillusioned with what they saw as the gradualism of the Bund, the
Jewish Social Democratic grouping, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and
the Polish Socialist Party. Meanwhile, young associates of Kropotkin
established the paper Khleb I Volia (Bread and Freedom) in Geneva, and
it was smuggled across the borders into the empire. Yiddish anarchist
papers from London also began to circulate in the Jewish Pale.
One of the principal architects of the nascent movement was Nikolai
Rogdaev (ca. 1880–1932), who constructed groups in Briansk, Nezhin, and
Ekaterinoslav and acted as a coordinator between many groups in Russia
and the Ukraine. In 1903, there were 12 organizations in 11 towns; in
1904, 29 groups in 27 centers of the northwest, southwest, and south; in
1905, 125 groups and federations in 110 towns; in 1906, 221 in 155
towns; and in 1907, at the height of the movement, there were 255 groups
in 180 localities. The most important centers of the movement were in
Bialystok, Odessa, and Ekaterinoslav, but anarchist activity could be
found in three-quarters of the empire.
Anarchists turned quickly to armed attacks, not just against the
servants of tsarist autocracy but also against factory owners and their
managers involved in lockouts and severe repression of workers. Heavily
involved in the events of 1904–5, they were the most committed fighters
on the barricades during the Moscow uprising of December 1905. Many
hundreds of anarchists died in the fighting or were hanged or died in
prison in the aftermath.
A new current, rejecting expropriations and individual terror, and
arguing for mass agitation among the workers and the organization of
revolutionary unions, began to develop. The principal theorist of this
anarchosyndicalist current was Daniil Novomirskii (aka Iakov
Kirillovskii, 1882–after 1936), whose South Russian Group of
Anarchosyndicalists had some success among workers in Odessa and
Ekaterinoslav between 1905 and 1907.
While there were still 108 groups within the empire in 1908, by 1914,
only seven remained. Many anarchists were forced into exile. A number of
unitary conferences took place, the first in Geneva in 1908 where the
groups around the papers Khleb I Volia and Burevestnik (Storm Petrel)
fused and formed the Union of Anarchist Communists. At one of the last
of these conferences (London, December 1913) the decision was taken to
form a Federation of Anarchist-Communist Groups in Exile with its own
paper. These moves were thwarted by the outbreak of war and the
acrimonious splits that resulted from the decision of Kropotkin and
others to support the Allies. Nonetheless, by 1915, the movement at home
had begun to grow again to around 250–300, mostly in Moscow, St.
Petersburg, and other urban centers, composed mostly of workers and a
few students.
The February Revolution of 1917 led to the freeing of many hundreds of
anarchists from prison, soon reinforced by many others returning from
exile. While this further galvanized a movement that had already started
growing as a result of the war, February was a great disappointment to
the anarchists, who now were moving into a loose working relationship
with their main rival, the Bolsheviks, to overthrow Kerensky’s
provisional government. In Moscow, anarchists expropriated many mansions
of the rich and published two daily papers with 60 affiliated groups.
There was a similarly strong following in Petrograd, where the
anarchists were a moving force in the July Days, an abortive attempt to
overthrow the provisional government. Both the anarchocommunists and
anarchosyndicalists engaged in intense propaganda.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the consolidation of Bolshevik power in
1918 soon brought the anarchists into confrontation with their erstwhile
allies. The Bolsheviks launched armed attacks on anarchists in Moscow,
closing down anarchist papers. This wave of repression continued through
the next two years.
In the Ukraine, the anarchist Nestor Makhno had begun organizing a
peasant insurrection, first against the Austro-Germans, then against the
Whites. Some anarchists from the urban centers began to join this
movement, in part because of Bolshevik repression there. The Nabat
Confederation of Anarchists was founded, working alongside Makhno’s
insurrectional army. To the east, in Siberia, anarchists began to
organize armed bands against the Whites. Both these movements soon
clashed with Bolshevism, leading to their repression. The culminating
point was the Kronstadt Revolt of 1921. Kropotkin’s funeral was to be
the last main manifestation of anarchism in Russia for many years.
Those who did not become Soviet anarchists (either outright embracing of
the Communist Party or fellow-traveling) were driven into exile. Many
did not have this choice and were either murdered by the Bolsheviks or
suffered many years in prisons or camps. As the French anarchist Louis
Mercier Vega (1914–77) noted: “In most of the eyewitness accounts of the
prisons and camps the anarchists feature, intractable, attached to their
convictions, hard like pebbles polished by cruelty and bad treatment.”
There appears to have been some anarchist involvement in the uprising at
the Siberian slave labor camp of Vorkuta in 1953, with the black flag
flying.
In exile, some anarchists like Makhno and Arshinov began to argue that
the failure of anarchism in Russia was due to chronic disorganization.
Whilst anarchism had widespread sympathy there, it had failed to take
advantage of this and had succumbed to its Bolshevik rival. There was
heated and acrimonious debate over this in exile circles.
Anarchist groups began to appear in the 1980s and 1989 saw the
establishment of the Confederation of Anarchosyndicalists (KAS), with
groups across Russia. Today, several small and divided anarchist
groupings exist in Russia: KRAS (the Russian section of the
International Workingmen’s Association, IWA), Autonomous Action (AD),
and the Association of Anarchist Movements (ADA). Putin’s Russia has not
been a favorable environment for the growth of anarchism, and there is
much ideological confusion within anarchist ranks.
SEE ALSO: Anarchism, Poland ; Anarchocommunism ; Anarchosyndicalism ;
Bakunin, Mikhail Alexandrovich (1814–1876) ; Bolsheviks ; Kronstadt
Mutiny of 1921 ; Kropotkin, Peter (1842–1921) ; Makhno, Nestor
(1889–1935) ; Nechaev, Sergei (1847–1882) ; Russia, Revolution of
1905–1907 ; Russia, Revolution of February/March 1917 ; Russia,
Revolution of October/November 1917 ; Soviet Union, Fall of
Avrich, P. (Ed.) (1973) The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution.
London: Thames & Hudson.
Avrich, P. (2005) The Russian Anarchists. Edinburgh: AK Press.
Maksimov, G. P. (1999) Syndicalists in the Russian Revolution. Los
Angeles: ICC.
Rabinowitch, A. (1991) Prelude to Revolution. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Skirda, A. (2000) Les Anarchistes russes, les soviets et la révolution
de 1917. Paris: Editions de Paris.